Although Swedes
and Dutch were the first European settlers, the Quaker William Penn
named Pennsylvania for the
Latin phrase meaning "Penn's Woods", in honor of his father.
Today, two major cities dominate the state—Philadelphia,
home of the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and a thriving metropolitan
area, and Pittsburgh,
a busy inland river port and major center for educational and technological
advance. The Pocono Mountains and the Delaware Water Gap provide popular
recreational activities.

Pennsylvania
is one of the U.S.'s most historic states. Philadelphia
is often called the cradle of the American Nation. It was here that
the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drawn up by
the Founding Fathers.

The so-called "Pennsylvania
Dutch" region in south-central Pennsylvania is another favorite
of sightseers. Pennsylvania Germans, including the Amish and the Mennonites,
dominate the area around the cities of Lancaster,
York, and Harrisburg,
with smaller numbers extending northeast to the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton
area and up the Susquehanna River valley. Some of the Old Order Amish
have left the area, but many Mennonites remain, particularly in Lancaster
County. Some adherents eschew modern conveniences and use horse-drawn
farming equipment and carriages, while others are virtually indistinguishable
from non-Amish or Mennonites.

(The term "Dutch"
is a misnomer, as none of these groups are of Dutch origin; the German
adjective for "German", Deutsch, was misheard as "Dutch"
and the name stuck.)

The battleship USS
Pennsylvania, damaged at Pearl Harbor, was named in honor of this state,
as were several other naval vessels. It was repaired at the former Sun
Ship Yard & Dry Dock in Chester City.

Geography

Pennsylvania's nickname
"The Keystone State" is quite apt, as the state forms a geographic
bridge both between the Northeastern states and the Southern states,
and between the Atlantic seaboard and the Midwest. It is bordered on
the north and northeast by New
York, on the east, across the Delaware River by New
Jersey, on the south by Delaware,
Maryland, and West
Virginia, on the west by Ohio,
and on the northwest by Lake Erie. The Delaware, Susquehanna, Monongahela,
Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers are the major rivers of the state. The Youghiogheny
River and Oil Creek are smaller rivers which have played an important
role in the development of the state. The capital is Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania
is 180 miles (290 km) north to south and 310 miles (500 km) east to
west. The total land area is 44,817 square miles (119,283 km²),
739,200 acres (2,990 km²) of which are bodies of water. It is the
33rd largest state in the United
States. The highest point of 3,213 feet (979 m) above sea level
is at Mount Davis. Its lowest point is at sea level on the Delaware
River. Pennsylvania is in
the Eastern time zone.

It sometimes helps
to consider the western third of the state a separate large geophysical
unit, which is so distinctive that it can often best be described on
its own. Several important, complex factors set Western Pennsylvania
apart in many respects from the east, such as the initial difficulty
of access across the mountains, an orientation to the Mississippi drainage
system of rivers, and above all, the complex economics involved in the
rise and decline of the American steel industry centered around Pittsburgh.
Other factors, such as a markedly different style of agriculture, the
rise of the oil industry, timber exploitation and the old wood chemical
industry, and even, in linguistics, the local yinzer dialect, all make
this large area sometimes seem a virtual "state within a state".

Pennsylvania
is bisected diagonally by ridges of the Appalachian Mountain chain from
southwest to northeast. To the northwest of the folded mountains is
the Allegheny Plateau, which continues into southwestern and south central
New York. This plateau is
so dissected by valleys that it also seems mountainous. The Plateau
is underlain by sedimentary rocks of Mississippian and Pennsylvanian
age, which bear abundant fossils, as well as natural gas and petroleum.
In 1859 near Titusville
Edwin L. Drake drilled the first oil well in the USA into these sediments.
Similar rock layers also contain coal to the south and east of the oil
and gas deposits. In the metamorphic (folded) belt, anthracite (hard
coal) is mined near Wilkes-Barre
and Hazleton.
These fossil fuels have been an important resource to Pennsylvania.
Timber and dairy farming are also sources of livelihood for midstate
and western Pennsylvania. Along the shore of Lake Erie in the far northwest
are orchards and vineyards.

Pennsylvania's has
89 miles of shoreline along the Delaware River estuary but is a landlocked
state with no coastline bordering the Atlantic Ocean. Pennsylvania
is the only truly landlocked state of the original thirteen states,
although Connecticut, located
on the Long Island Sound, also has no actual coastline.

Pennsylvania
has one of the largest seaports in the U.S. on its narrow shore, the
Port of Philadelphia. In the west the Port of Pittsburgh is also very
large and even exceeds Philadelphia
in rank by annual tonnage, due to the large volume of bulk coal shipped
by barge down the Ohio River. Chester,
downstream from Philadelphia, and Erie,
the Great Lakes outlet on Lake Erie in the Erie Triangle, are smaller
but still important ports.

Pennsylvania
has been the site of some of the most horrendous ecological disasters
experienced in the USA. In 1889 the South Fork Dam, impounding a recreational
mountain lake for sportsmen, burst after a heavy rain and destroyed
the downstream factory town of Johnstown,
killing over 2,200 inhabitants in the notorious Johnstown Flood (the
town was later rebuilt and is a reasonably large community today in
the central mountains). In 1961 an exposed seam of coal at Centralia,
Pennsylvania caught fire and forced eventually almost the entire
community to abandon their settlement; the coal fire is still burning
today and is estimated to last 100 years more. Finally, in 1979 the
Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Incident near the state capital of Harrisburg,
while not as destructive to the community, nevertheless cost close to
$1 billion to clean up and changed the national public perception of
nuclear power to a much less favorable viewpoint.

History

Before the state
existed, the area was home to the Delaware (also known as Lenni Lenape),
Susquehanna, Iroquois, Eriez, Shawnee, and other Native American tribes.

In 1643, the southeastern
portion of the state, in the vicinity of Philadelphia,
was settled by Sweden, but control later passed to the Netherlands,
and then to England (later Great Britain).

On March 4, 1681,
Charles II of England granted a land charter to William Penn for the
area that now includes Pennsylvania.
Penn then founded a colony there as a place of religious freedom for
the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), and named it for the Latin
phrase meaning "Penn's woods".

A large tract of
land north and west of Philadelphia,
in Montgomery, Chester, and Delaware Counties, was settled by Welsh
Quakers and called the "Welsh Tract". Even today many cities
and towns in that area bear the names of Welsh municipalities.

The western portions
of Pennsylvania were among
disputed territory between the colonial British and French during the
French and Indian War. The French established numerous fortifications
in the area, including the pivotal Fort Duquesne on top of which the
city of Pittsburgh
was built.

The colony's reputation
of religious freedom also attracted significant populations of German
and Scots-Irish settlers who helped to shape colonial Pennsylvania and
later went on to populate the neighboring states further west.

In 1704 the "three
lower counties" of New Castle, Kent, and Sussex gained a separate
legislature, and in 1710 a separate executive council, to form the new
colony Delaware.

Pennsylvania
and Delaware were two of
the thirteen colonies that revolted against British rule in the American
Revolution of 1776. Pennsylvania
became the second state on 12 December 1787 (five days after Delaware
became the first).

Pennsylvania
also saw the Battle of Gettysburg, near Gettysburg.
Many historians consider this battle the major turning point of the
American Civil War. Dead from this battle rest at Gettysburg National
Cemetery, site of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

In the latter half
of the 19th century, the U.S. oil (kerosene) industry was born in western
Pennsylvania, which supplied the vast majority of U.S. kerosene for
years thereafter, and saw the rise and fall of oil boom towns.

During the 20th
century Pennsylvania's existing iron industries expanded into a major
center of steel production. Shipbuilding and numerous other forms of
manufacturing flourished in the eastern part of the state, and coal
mining was also extremely important in many regions. In the late 1800s
and early 1900s, Pennsylvania
received very large numbers of immigrants from Europe seeking work;
dramatic, sometimes violent confrontations took place between organized
labor and the state's industrial concerns.

Pennsylvania
was hard-hit by the decline of the steel industry and other heavy U.S.
industries during the late 20th century.

Law and Government

Like all American
states, the government of Pennsylvania is separated into an executive,
a legislature, and a judiciary, the powers and duties of which are established
by the Pennsylvania Constitution. The capital of Pennsylvania
is in Harrisburg.

Executive branch

The head of the
executive branch is the Governor, who is currently Democrat Edward G
Rendell, a former mayor of Philadelphia.
The other elected officials composing the executive branch are the Lieutenant
Governor, Attorney General, Auditor General, and State Treasurer. The
Governor's cabinet consists of the eighteen appointed heads of Pennsylvania
state agencies: the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Adjutant General,
Secretary of Education, Insurance Commissioner, Secretary of Banking,
Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Health, State Police Commissioner,
Secretary of Labor and Industry, Secretary of Public Welfare, Secretary
of Revenue, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Community Affairs, Secretary
of Transportation, Secretary of Environmental Resources, Secretary of
General Services, Secretary of Aging, and the Secretary of Corrections.

Legislative branch

Pennsylvania
has had a bicameral legislature since 1790. The Pennsylvania General
Assembly consists of a Senate with 50 members and a House of Representatives
with 203. Notable General Assembly members include Senate President
Pro Tempore Robert C. Jubelirer (R), Senate Majority Leader David J.
Brightbill (R), Senate Minority Leader Robert J. Mellow (D), Speaker
of the House of Representatives John M. Perzel (R), House Majority Leader
Samuel H. Smith (R), House Minority Leader H. William DeWeese (D), and
Senate Minority Appropriations Chairman Vincent Fumo (D).

Judicial branch

Pennsylvania
is divided into 60 judicial districts, most of which (save Philadelphia
and Allegheny Counties) have district justices (formerly called justices
of the peace), who preside mainly over minor criminal offenses and small
civil claims. The Philadelphia
Municipal Court and the Pittsburgh
police magistrate court have similar jurisdiction, but are limited to
those locations. As Philadelphia
is coterminous with Philadelphia County, the Pittsburgh
police magistrate court is the only true city-level court in the state.

The general trial
courts in which most criminal and civil cases originate are the Courts
of Common Pleas. They also serve as appellate courts to the district
justices and for local agency decisions. The Courts of Common Pleas
serving the larger Pennsylvania
counties are divided into specialized divisions.

The state has two
intermediate-level appellate courts: the Superior Court and the Commonwealth
Court. The fifteen judges of the Superior Court hear all appeals from
the Courts of Common Pleas not expressly designated to the Commonwealth
Court or Supreme Court. It also has original jurisdiction to review
warrants for wiretap surveillance. The jurisdiction of the nine-judge
Commonwealth Court is limited to appeals from final orders of certain
state agencies and certain designated cases from the Courts of Common
Pleas. The Commonwealth Court also functions as a trial court in some
civil suits, including cases that involve the state or its officers
as parties, and cases regarding statewide elections.

Pennsylvania's entire
judicial system is under the supervision of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania,
which is also the final appellate court for both the Superior Court
and the Commonwealth Court. It also hears appeals directly from the
Courts of Common Pleas in certain cases, including from murder convictions
in which the death penalty has been imposed, the right to public office,
criminal contempt, and any case in which the Court of Common Pleas ruled
that a state law was unconstitutional. Like all judges in Pennsylvania,
the seven justices of the Supreme Court are chosen by public election;
the chief justice is the justice with the most seniority.

Politics in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania
is considered a swing state as its politics are not dominated by any
single party. As of 2005, the Republican Party holds both houses of
the state legislature, both United States Senate seats and a majority
of the state's seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the Democratic
Party holds the governor's seat and their candidate has won the state
in the past four presidential elections. Bill Clinton carried the state
twice, Al Gore won here in 2000 as did John Kerry in 2004 with a slim
50.9% of the vote. The state is divided into heavily left leaning areas
along the sides. Democrats are the majority in the Philadelphia
area, as well as around Allentown,
Scranton and
Wilkes-Barre
in the east, and in the southwestern part of the state, the Pittsburgh
area in the west and Erie
in the northwest. The central, more rural part of the state tends to
be very conservative. James Carville, the outspoken Democratic strategist,
summed up Pennsylvania politics as "Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh
on the other, with Alabama in the middle."

Economics

Pennsylvania's 1999
total gross state product was $383 billion, placing it 6th in the nation
and its 2000 Per Capita Personal Income was $29,539, 18th in the nation.
Its agricultural outputs are dairy products, poultry, cattle, nursery
stock, mushrooms, hogs, and hay. Its industrial outputs are food processing,
chemical products, machinery, electric equipment, and tourism.

Pennsylvania
has a large, diverse group of manufacturing companies and within this
group are some whose products have come to be household words, symbolic
of ordinary American life. Among these products are Hershey bars from
the Hershey Chocolate Company in Hershey,
Pennsylvania; Heinz ketchup and Heinz-57 sauce from the H. J. Heinz
Company in Pittsburgh;
Crayola products from Binney & Smith, Inc., in Easton;
and Zippo lighters from Zippo Manufacturing in Bradford.

Small companies,
such as the Pennsylvania Dutch Candies company, also exist in Pennsylvania.

Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania is well know for its quality wood products such as furniture,
sheds, gazebos and play sets. Such items are shipped all over the country
(and the world) out of Lancaster County. Most of these are produced
by Amish and Mennonite craftsmen.

Demographics

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, as of 2004,
Pennsylvania's population was 12,406,292. This includes 568,800
foreign-born (4.6% of the state population). The Commonwealth
has one of the fastest growing Asian and Hispanic populations
in the nation. During the 1970s and 1980s, Pennsylvania
grew sluggishly. In the 1990s and into 2000, more people from
other states (migrants) started moving to Pennsylvania.
Foreign immigration has also picked up for the first time since
World War II.

Pennsylvania
is mainly white in certain areas such as the far northeast, north
central, and some areas around Pittsburgh.
The Philadelphia
Metro and the surrounding counties and the state as a whole are
a true melting pot with large numbers of Blacks, Hispanics, South
Asians, East Asians, and Arabs.

Pennsylvanians
of German ancestry live in most areas of the state outside of
Philadelphia.
Northeastern Pennsylvania has residents of British ancestry on
the New York border
and there are many Polish-Americans in the Scranton
area. Philadelphia
has a black plurality and smaller black populations are located
in Pittsburgh
and Harrisburg.
Irish-Americans are the single largest ancestry group in Delaware
county and the overall Philadelphia
metropolitan area. Pennsylvania
has more Slovaks and Welsh than any other state. Pennsylvania
also has among the largest populations of Germans, Irish, Italians,
and Russians of any state, and the most Ukrainians of any state
besides New York.

5.9% of Pennsylvania's
population were reported as under 5, 23.8% under 18, and 15.6%
were 65 or older. Females made up approximately 51.7% of the population.

Religion

Historically,
the Quakers pursued a policy of religious toleration at the founding
of Penn's colony (Pennsylvania),
which benefited other older groups, such as Lutherans from the
New Sweden settlement, and which also attracted religious refugees
from the European continent, such as Amish and Mennonites. Other
groups also settled, including the Moravian Bretheren, who founded
and named today's large city of Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who settled
on the frontier. This was a fairly diverse group of denominations
by Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century standards, and testifies
to the benign administration of Penn.

Later, after
industrialization, immigrants from the Catholic countries of Europe
started coming in large numbers to Pennsylvania.
In Philadelphia
today stands a shrine to and the burial place of Saint John Neumann,
himself a Czech immigrant, who worked for the betterment of the
new arrivals and who founded the American parochial school system.
Pennsylvania has one
of the largest Jewish populations in the country, with about 440,000.
Mass immigration to Pennsylvania
in the past 20 years has brought large numbers of Buddhists, Hindus,
Muslims, and Sikhs to the state.

Important Cities and Towns

Pennsylvania
has only one incorporated town, Bloomsburg,
the county seat of Columbia County. All other municipalities are incorporated
as cities, boroughs or townships. It is technically incorrect to refer
to any municipality in Pennsylvania
other than Bloomsburg
as a town.

Notable Pennsylvanians

Benjamin Franklin
(1706–1790) was one of the most important figures in Pennsylvania's
history, although he was born in Boston,
Massachusetts. He founded the University of Pennsylvania in 1742.
He had the distinction of signing both the Declaration of Independence
and the U.S. Constitution. He is buried with his wife Deborah in Christ
Church Cemetery in Philadelphia.

Stephen Foster
was born in Pittsburgh
on July 4, 1826. He was the pre-eminent songwriter in the United
States of his era. Many of his songs, such as "Oh! Susanna",
"Camptown Races", and "Beautiful Dreamer", are
still popular over 150 years after their composition.

James Buchanan
(1791–1868) was born and lived in Pennsylvania
until his death. He was the 15th President of the United States and
the only President from that state.

George M. Dallas
(1792–1864) of Philadelphia
served as the 11th Vice President of the United States under James
K. Polk and is the only Pennsylvanian to hold the office. He also
served as U.S. Minister to Great Britain and Russia, as Mayor of Philadelphia
and in the Senate.

Thaddeus Stevens
(1792–1868) was born and lived in Pennsylvania
until his death. He was a key Pennsylvania state legislator in establishing
and maintaining Pennsylvania's early system of public education. As
a U.S. Congressman and leading "Radical Republican", he
helped draft the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing
"equal protection of the laws" to all Americans.

Rachel Carson
(1907–1964) born near Springdale,
was a pioneer environmentalist and author of Silent Spring

Winfield Scott
Hancock (1824–1886) was born in Montgomery
Square. He commanded Union troops during the American Civil War,
most notably during the Battle of Gettysburg.

Ida Tarbell
(1857–1944) was born in Erie
and was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was a pioneering "muckraker"
journalist and one of the few female journalists in the country during
her time. In 1906, she joined with Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard
Baker to establish the radical American Magazine. She also wrote several
books on the role of women including The Business of Being a Woman
(1912) and The Ways of Women (1915).

Pop artist Andy
Warhol (1928–1987) was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh.
The Andy Warhol Museum is located in Pittsburgh's North Side, and
he is buried in nearby Bethel Park.

Kurt Angle (1968—)
was born and raised in Pittsburgh.
Angle won the Gold Medal in freestyle Roman/Greco wrestling at the
1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta,
Georgia, USA, before signing with Vince McMahon's World Wrestling
Entertainment, where he has won the WWE Championship on four different
occasions. Angle is one of only two wrestlers in the WWE to have participated
in the Olympics, and is the only one to have won gold medals.

K. Leroy Irvis
(1918—) was born near Albany,
New York, but came to Pennsylvania
to head Pittsburgh's
Urban League in the 1940s. Fired under pressure after leading a successful
boycott of Pittsburgh's
department stores for discriminating against African-Americans, Irvis
enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh law school, graduated with
honors, became Pittsburgh's
first black judicial law clerk, then an assistant district attorney,
then a state legislator. Serving 30 years in the Pennsylvania House
(1958–1988), 26 of them as an elected Democratic leader, Irvis
became the first 20th Century African-American Speaker in 1977. He
was a major force behind numerous successful efforts to expand educational
opportunities in Pennsylvania.

General of the
Army George C. Marshall (1880–1959) of Uniontown, lead the United
States Army as Chief of Staff during the Second World War. He later
served as Secretary of State and authored the Marshall Plan.

Tom Ridge, The
former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (1945-),
was Governor of Pennsylvania between 1995 and 2003. Prior to that,
he was a US Representative from Erie
between 1982 and 1995.

Eugene W. Hickok,
The former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education from 2004–2005,
and prior to that, Pennsylvania's Secretary of Education from 1995–2001.

Marion Anderson,
of Philadelphia,
world-reknowned contralto, who, after the Daughters of the American
Revolution refused to let her sing at Constitution Hall because she
was African-American, was famously invited to sing at the Lincoln
Memorial by Eleanor Roosevelt.

Pennsylvania in popular music

Pennsylvania
has given birth to some of the nation's leading popular and rock music
groups, including Anti-Flag, Christina Aguilera, Bloodhound Gang, Boyz
II Men, Vanessa Carlton, Coolio, Fuel, Hall & Oates, Live, Joan
Jett, Patti LaBelle, Pink, Poison, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails,
The Roots, Jill Scott, Shanice, Will Smith, The Dead Milkmen, Flag of
Democracy, Brett Michaels to name a few.

Pennsylvanians in Film,
Television, and Theater

Many Pennsylvanians have
found success in film, television, and the theater including:

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